Sea Islanders - History and Cultural Relations

The strategic location of the Sea Islands is reflected in the history of
conflict in the region. Port Royal Sound is the deepest and most
accessible harbor on the east coast south of Chesapeake Bay;
consequently, Spanish, French, and English colonizers all competed for
control of the area. Fierce resistance by the indigenous Yemassee
peoples made stable European settlement on the southernmost islands
impossible until the early eighteenth century. Early British planters
came from Barbados, bringing with them a plantation system based on
monocrop agriculture and African slavery. The original cash crop,
indigo, was replaced by long-staple cotton after the American
Revolution. This Sea Island cotton produced huge fortunes for the White
planters and the region developed a reputation for wealth and luxury.

All this came to an end on November 6, 1861, when the federal fleet,
moving north to blockade Charleston, attacked the two small Confederate
forts on Hilton Head. The planters evacuated inland, leaving behind
their slaves and the year's cotton crop still in the field. This
constellation of events set the stage for the famous "Sea Island
Experiment" (or Port Royal Experiment), a federal program to
determine whether or not ex-slaves could function as free, small-holding
citizens. The experiment, sponsored by the secretary of the treasury and
administered by a young abolitionist lawyer from Boston, envisioned
freed slaves working for wages on government-owned cotton plantations
while being prepared for eventual citizenship. Missionaries, teachers,
and agricultural specialists were provided by northern benevolent
societies, bringing an influx of young, well-educated, fiercely
abolitionist men and women from the North behind the battle lines of the
Civil War. As the Reconstruction promise of "40 acres and a
mule" was revealed as a myth throughout the rest of the South,
Sea Islanders, working with northern advisers, managed to gain legal
title to most of the land they had formerly worked as slaves. In the
words of Willie Lee Rose, the Sea Island Experiment was indeed a
"rehearsal for reconstruction" and one of the few places
in the South where African Americans emerged from the war with a secure
land base.

Although many researchers have stressed the physical isolation of the
Sea Islands and imply that their people have been "cut
off" since the nineteenth century from mainland U.S. history,
this is clearly not the case. In actuality, the islands have never been
fully self-sufficient, and periodic male labor migration has been an
important source of income since boll weevil infestations at the turn of
the century destroyed small-holder cotton production. Sea Islanders have
historically produced and sold agricultural products in the markets of
cities like Savannah and Charleston, and the men have worked as
commercial fishermen and longshoremen up and down the eastern seaboard
for generations. What is unique to the island communities is not their
geographic isolation but their economic and cultural autonomy. The
ownership of land appears to be the crucial variable in Sea
Islanders' ability to choose what off-island work they will
accept and for how long. Many of the islands instituted their own legal
and criminal codes, administered through the churches, allowing them to
bypass the White-controlled "unjust law" of the mainland.
Since the 1950s, much of the traditional land base has been eroded by
out-migration, rising property taxes, forced sheriff's sales, and
other coercive practices employed by White developers. As a result, the
remaining African American population is increasingly dependent upon
wages earned in the service sector of the seasonal tourist economy.

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